London, UK

Be an owner and a valued thought partner. Join Portia AI!

Agents are still difficult to deploy at scale in Production environments but the industry agrees fixing them will unlock the future of AI. In Sam Altman’s words “Users will increasingly interact with systems…which can take actions on their behalf, rather than talking to a single model”. If this challenge speaks to you, there is no better place to shape the answer than Portia AI!

We are a seasoned (and possibly even fun) founding team with leadership experience in product and engineering roles at Amazon, Google and Stripe. We are backed by some of the best VCs out there including General Catalyst and First Minute Capital. We are looking to build a talented, nimble and meritocratic engineering team to execute on this. Would you like to be our Founding Engineer? Read on.

Our Mission

LLMs today have the ability to indicate that they want to consider one or many tools to answer a user’s prompt. As businesses start deploying LLMs at a larger scale in production environments, the tool calling layer will need to evolve to ensure that it can handle a variety of authentication mechanisms, can offer a wide and expandable library of tools, and can personalise the tools it provides to the LLM. Portia exists to solve those emerging challenges: We want to make it dead simple for developers to add secure and accurate tool calling to their AI deployments.

The role

As our Founding Engineer you have a deep impact on culture, pace and product quality. You are ready to thrive in a fast paced environment with a high degree of ambiguity and you want to shape the future of the product and the company. You bring a breadth of technical knowledge across several disciplines as well the ability to upskill on a topic as needed. You will be responsible for designing, conceptualising and building the stack from the ground up. Key requirements include:

• Degree in Computer Science, Engineering, AI, Math, Physics, or similar – or equivalent additional work experience
• At least 8+ years of work experience as a software engineer, including 2+ years as a technical lead
• Excellent problem solving skills and strong product mindset
• Excellent communication skills to interact with founding team and customers
• Ability to lead a cross-disciplinary engineering team with resilience and empathy
• Nice to have:
  • Working knowledge of Django and GCP
  • Early stage (series A or earlier) startup experience
  • Experience developing open source software
  • Excellent knowledge of authentication schemes
  • Ability to understand and implement technical state-of-the-art research papers
  • Proficiency to write production-level code for AI/LLM based applications
  • Proficiency with advanced Python workflows including Pytorch, Langchain, LlamaIndex, OpenAI or similar LLMOps libraries (Scikit-learn, pandas etc.)
  • Experience with RAG and fine-tuning LLMs

What you’ll be doing

Our development stack is Python, Django, React, Next.js and Google Cloud. Responsibilities include: